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Friday, 23 February 2018

In December
2017, after the end of the phase 1 talks, I
wrote on this blog that what would now happen would be that “we will
continue to travel endlessly around the Mobius Strip of Brexiter madness. That
is to say, on the one hand the Ultras will keep finding new ways to imagine
that it is possible to have all of features of being in the single market
without being in the single market, whilst the EU will keep finding new ways to
explain that this cannot be so”. The Chequers Awayday meeting was the last
chance the government had before the phase 2 talks start to get off this
endless fantasy loop. They blew it, and have arrived back at something that was
first mooted as far back as 2016: a form of sector-by-sector Brexit.The current
version goes by various new names – three baskets, managed divergence or, freshly
minted today, ‘ambitious
managed divergence’. Whatever term is used the idea is almost certainly
doomed to failure. In December 2016 I discussed some of the reasons why in a blog on UK
in a Changing Europe website. I won’t reprise all that now, but one issue,
which may not be immediately obvious, is that business sectors are rarely, if
ever, discrete, clearly bounded, entities. For example, the government can talk
about ‘the automotive sector’ but that pulls in goods and services from all
kinds of other sectors, such as textiles or computer software. Sectors do not
stand alone.That indeed
is one of the reasons why (as
is already clear) the EU are highly unlikely to agree anything like the
Chequers model. That is often expressed in terms of a refusal to allow ‘cherry
picking’, but I think that is a misleading expression, implying that the juicy
cherries are there to be plucked if only the EU would be more flexible or if
the UK were to negotiate bullishly enough.The real
point is that the single market is, conceptually, precisely that: a single
market. It is not in principle a single market in X or in Y, and if it were to
be, or become, so it would lose what is central to its defining characteristic
and its economic rationale. It is true that, to the extent that it is still a
work in progress, especially in services, some sectors lie outside it and are
only gradually being brought in. But those sectoral exceptions are temporary,
usually for reasons of technical difficulty; anomalies to be rectified, not end
states to be made permanent. The single market doesn’t just unify national
markets, it creates a unified market tout
court.There is
another issue – perhaps not worth spending much time on, since the whole model
is almost certainly not going to happen, but important for understanding one of
the key confusions of Brexiters. That confusion is the now often-stated idea
that a UK trade deal with the EU will be easy because of existing convergence,
which is the thing that is time-consuming in normal trade deals. The
meta-problem with that is that this is not an ordinary trade deal in that it
will be concerned – uniquely – with divergence not convergence, as
discussed in a previous blog post. But within that, there is a particular
issue that arises from the idea of a sector-by sector Brexit.If we think
about a normal trade deal, one of the key sources of delay is that powerful business
groups lobby for their sectors to be excluded (i.e. to protect themselves from
competition) and/or to shape the forms that regulatory convergence takes. In
the Brexit case, the same lobbying will happen but in reverse: almost all
sectors will lobby to be amongst those included in the single market and/or to
shape the forms that regulatory divergence will take. So whereas it would very
probably be fairly quick to agree a soft Brexit of Britain staying entirely in
the single market (via EEA/EFTA), it will be no quicker to negotiate a sectoral
Brexit than it would be to negotiate any other trade deal – in other words,
many years.But all this
is, as I say, largely beside the point. Unless something drastic changes on the
UK red line on the ECJ (and that’s not impossible: we already see signs of it
softening over Citizens’ Rights and security), then ‘ambitious managed
divergence’ is a dead duck. It simply won’t work to have some sectors of the UK
economy in the single market on the basis of the UK sticking to EU regulations
for this or that sector or having some form of mutual recognition agreement
(itself a much more complex matter than the government seems to understand,
which would need another post but in the meantime see this
briefing from the Institute for Government). The reason it won’t work is
simple: what happens when there are differences between, or disputes about, the
application of regulations? Some body has to decide, and that has to be a
supra-national body. The UK courts by definition are national not
supra-national, so it has to be the ECJ. This the key take away from a detailed
assessment of ‘sectoral Brexit’ from the UK Trade Policy Observatory (which
is well worth a read not just on the ECJ issue, but also those of mutual
recognition agreements and the WTO constraints on sectoral Brexit).So, still, the Brexit government is trying to square the circles of incompatible
demands. What they want is logically impossible to deliver, and it doesn’t matter
a jot how often Brexiters invoke ‘the Will of the People’ to insist that it ‘must’
be delivered. You can vote that the earth is flat, but it doesn’t make it so,
and it doesn’t enable ships to sail or aircraft to fly to insist it ‘must’ be
so. It is extremely unfortunate – and, frankly, embarrassing - that it falls to
the EU to keep having to tell the
British government that its demands are impossible because that, of course,
feeds the Brexiters’ narrative of ‘punishment’. It would be far preferable if
our own politicians were to have the courage to tell the British people the
truth.The
Conservative Party, of course, is hamstrung by its ERG Ultras, who
have been out again in force this week demanding a scorched earth Brexit
(for a revealing analysis of this group and its motivations see
Otto English’s blog, and for an analysis of the inadequacy of the ERG
letter’s understanding of the WTO issues it raises, see ex-WTO official Peter Ungphakorn’s
twitter thread). As a result, the government shows only occasional flashes
of realism (for example, this week, on the likely need for a longer transition
period and on an acceptance that EU nationals arriving in the UK during the transition
period will have full rights), and these only after having resisted the obvious
for so long that this realism can be positioned as a betrayal by the Ultras.It is Labour
who hold the key, because although politics is a complex business sometimes it
can be thought of in the very simple way of parliamentary arithmetic. For the
time being, they are only inching towards something
realistic in terms of a customs union, but it is too little and too slow. It’s
actually quite strange that the Labour leadership seem to have reservations about
a comprehensive customs union only on the grounds that it would entail the Common
Commercial Policy (CCP; i.e. no independent trade policy), since business doesn’t
care about that (as the business benefits are almost non-existent whilst the costs are huge) and the Corbynite
objection to the EU is on the grounds of global neo-liberalization.It is a
tantalising thought that if Jeremy Corbyn were to come out in favour not just
of a comprehensive customs treaty but also single market membership then he
would be both the most left-wing leader of the Labour Party in modern times and
the champion of the ‘jobs first Brexit’ he apparently wants, whilst also
positioning Labour as ‘the party of business’. That term used to be the
unquestioned possession of the Conservatives, of course, and one of the
strangest political turnarounds of Brexit is how unequivocally they have become
an anti-business party as well as becoming committed to damaging British
geo-political standing and influence. Above all, the Conservative Party used to
pride itself on being ‘non-ideological’ and pragmatic. In its Brexit
incarnation it is neither. Hence we have a government committed – and there is
no precedent for this in modern British history that I am aware of – to the art
of the impossible.

Sunday, 18 February 2018

Munich may
not be the most historically auspicious place for a British Prime Minister to give
a speech about European security, but Theresa May delivered what Charles
Grant, the widely respected Director of the Centre for European Reform, rightly
called a serious
speech. This, perhaps, reflects that after her years in the Home Office
security is an area where she feels comfortable and knowledgeable. Even so, it
contained many ambiguities when the time for ambiguity is running out.Was the
speech intended to be conciliatory and reassuring in stating “unconditionally” Britain’s
commitment to Europe’s internal and external security? Or was intended to be threatening
in its detailed references to Britain’s intelligence and military capabilities?
Was she saying we need each other, or that you need us more than we need you?
Perhaps both, and, if so, perhaps for difference audiences?Was the
reference to the need to prevent “rigid institutional restrictions or
deep-seated ideology” getting in the way of a deal on security a staggeringly
unreflective remark given that the Brexit Ultras, indeed Brexit itself, are the
most obvious embodiment of such dogma? Or was it a warning to those same Ultras
of the need to be flexible? Was it saying to the EU that whereas the options
for trade have been framed in terms of pre-existing models (Norway, Canada)
that for security could be bespoke (though, strangely, she invoked trade as an
area where there are precedents for a bespoke deal)? Or did it mean that if
security could be dealt with on a bespoke basis then why not trade and
everything else? Or did it in fact
imply, as Sky News’ Political Editor Faisal Islam suggested, a different model,
that of the Ukraine
Association Agreement?The
references to the role of the ECJ were potentially highly significant, but
again ambiguous. She accepted that “when participating in EU agencies the UK
will respect the remit of the European Court of Justice”, but the sentence
before said that any agreement “must be respectful of both the UK and the EU’s
legal orders” (and a spokesperson later said that she had just meant that the
UK would
pay “due regard” to ECJ rulings). So does this mean Britain accepting
actual, or perhaps de facto, ECJ jurisdiction with respect to participation in
those agencies or not? Does it imply, instead, some kind of new UK-EU legal
body (I
have thought, ever since the White Paper was published, that this was where
things were heading) and if so how would it work and what would the
implications be for participation in other agencies, such as Euratom? The ECJ
red line, first drawn by May in her Party Conference speech in 2016, has
created some of the most intractable problems for Brexit – but was she
softening it or restating it in the Munich speech?The meaning
of these ambiguities is itself ambiguous. Is it that she dare not be clear for fear of
causing uproar within her party? Or that she is not clear in her own mind what
she means? Sometimes, I have the sense that May is simply not alive to the
implications of the phrases that she uses. Going right back to the ‘Brexit
means Brexit’ months, before the Lancaster House speech, she used to speak of
retaining frictionless trade in goods and services. This seemed to code a soft
Brexit, since that is the only way of achieving such trade. But subsequently it
emerged that this was not what she meant, even though she still uses the same
phrase, and it sometimes seems that she does not understand the complexities
and subtleties of what is involved in Brexit – for example the full
implications of having set herself so firmly against any role for the ECJ. That
may seem an extraordinary thing to say of a Prime Minister and seasoned
politician, but if the picture created by Tim Shipman’s
widely acclaimed book Fall Out is
accurate it may be correct. There, she is portrayed very much as a blank canvas
on to which her advisers painted pretty much whatever they wanted.Whether
studied or uncomprehending, her ambiguity has in the past served her well,
allowing different people to project on to her whatever they find conducive.
This has enabled her to walk the line between EU and domestic pressures and
between different factions in her ever-more fractious party. The Munich speech
reflects that: it can be read as slowly
inching her Ultras towards pragmatism or slowly inching the EU towards
creating the bespoke Brexit that she apparently thinks possible. (Shipman’s
book is again revealing on this, both in suggesting that she does, indeed,
reject the ‘Norway-Canada’ duality and, also, that she regards the ‘opt out and
selectively opt back in’ approach that she adopted to the EU whilst at the Home
Office as the template for Brexit, although few regard it as realistic.
Tellingly, she made reference to exactly that experience in her Munich speech).However,
such ambiguity is fast becoming a fatal weakness. Had we but world enough and
time, to use the words of Marvell’s famous poem, it might be viable to keep
walking the tightrope and, perhaps, to gradually push whoever it is she wants
to push towards whatever it is she wants to push towards, if indeed she knows.
Since she sent the Article 50 letter, though, time has been at a premium and
has now all but expired. May’s speech in Munich may have been serious but the
ambiguities within it, as well as her wider ambiguities about Brexit, cannot
persist for much longer. Within the next few months, if not indeed the next few
weeks, she will need to come off several carefully-constructed but inherently
fragile fences.

Friday, 16 February 2018

Boris
Johnson’s much-trailed speech – discussed in more detail in my
previous post and witheringly dissected
by John Crace – seems already to have sunk without trace. It certainly hasn’t
injected the optimism and positivity which he believes is lacking in the
government’s approach (and one can, at least, agree that Theresa May hardly exudes or inspires enthusiasm). The reason is something I touched on in that previous
post: it was a speech campaigning for Brexit, not a speech about delivering it;
a speech for 2016, not 2018.That is
partly about Johnson’s own manifest limitations as a politician, but it is also
indicative of the much wider mess that the Brexiters have got themselves – and thereby
our country – into. It is by now obvious to all but the most unreflectively doctrinaire
amongst them that the process of leaving the EU is going to be far, far more
complicated, risky and damaging than the Leave Campaign told voters would be
the case. During the campaign every warning was contemptuously dismissed, and
yet every one of them has proved to be correct – from the implications for the
Irish border, to those for business (see here
for the latest damage), to the time constraints on negotiating a deal, to
the economic and cultural benefit of freedom of movement to Britain and
to Britons, to the impossibility of cut and pasting EU agreements with third countries,
right through to the absurdity of the overarching claim that Britain could
retain all of the features of EU membership it wanted without having those that
it (or at least that Brexiters) disliked.For that
matter, many issues have surfaced which were scarcely, if at all, discussed
before the vote. Things like Euratom membership, chemicals and medicine
regulation, and all the arcana of international trade such as Rules of Origin,
Most Favoured Nation status, or Mutual Recognition Agreements. Almost every day
some new aspect or consequence arises, even as the time until Brexit happens
drains remorselessly away. On the other hand, no one suddenly discovers some previously
unexpected benefit of Brexit. Indeed about the only concrete benefit Brexiters now
routinely try to claim is that of having an independent trade policy, the
economic value of which will be, at best, nugatory and more than offset by the costs of leaving.The profound difficulty
this poses for Brexiters is that they
now have responsibility for what happens. Their policy is the government’s
policy, and many of their leading figures – for example Johnson, Fox, Davis,
Fernandes, Baker, Raab, Mordaunt, Gove, Leadsom – hold government positions and
in some cases have direct responsibility for implementing Brexit. There is no
longer any escape from dealing with all of these complex practicalities and
they can’t bear it. The absurdity of that is well-illustrated by the way that
these Brexiters in government dismiss their own economic forecasts as worthless,
if not deliberately biased. But that trick won’t work anymore. Outside of the
hardcore, most people, including probably most leave voters, have wised up to
the fact that, whatever the exact figures turn out to be, they are only going
in one direction.Johnson’s
response, of trying to pretend he is still campaigning, rather than being
responsible, for Brexit is ludicrous but relatively urbanely expressed (albeit,
not
benign). Far more widespread is the vicious aggression exemplified by Digby Jones this
week, accusing “remoaners” of “undermining our country” and saying they
will be “to blame” for Britain getting a “lousy deal”. This Brexit
McCarthyism has been on display since the day after the Referendum – the
day, in fact, that, according
to this same Digby Jones, “Germany would immediately want a free trade deal”
- but will only grow as things get worse for the Brexiters. Anything rather
than take responsibility for their failed promises, their ignorance of basic
realities, and their lies. Anything to sustain their sense of betrayal and
victimhood.A different
kind of evasion comes from those Brexiters who claim that leaving the EU was
always going to be damaging, in particular economically, but that people had
voted for cultural reasons or for sovereignty and both knew and were prepared
to pay the economic price. That may have been true of some leave voters, but it
certainly isn’t the way that Brexit was pitched to them. On the contrary, the
constant rebuttal of ‘Project Fear’ was in the main an economic claim to the
effect that Brexit would at the least have no adverse consequences if not,
indeed, that it would have positive consequences.Moreover,
the infamous £350M a week for the NHS lie was nothing if not an economic
argument for Brexit. Most Brexiters lightly dismiss this now, with word games
or just the open admission that it was a lie. But it was believed by many voters,
including some of the poorest (as, for example, this
recent report shows). Even the argument about immigration was in part an
economic one (the supposed negative effect on wages and public services). Whatever
they say now, Brexiters ran a campaign that was every bit as economic-focussed
as it was cultural, and that’s not surprising: had they argued for Brexit on
purely cultural lines they would have lost the vote. That, indeed, has
been admitted by Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings. The deeper point is that economics and culture are not separate things: I heard some leave voters explain their decision in terms of the de-industrialization of their towns. They were bemoaning loss of jobs and loss of community, not just one or the other.We also now
begin to hear another evasion, of a sort beloved by proponents of many political
and religious ideologies and for that matter by many a management consultant,
that nothing was wrong with the ‘idea’ of Brexit but that its ‘implementation’
was mishandled. So whatever mess we end up with is not ‘proper Brexit’. It’s
true that the government have approached Brexit in an incredibly incompetent
way – the premature triggering of Article 50 and the consequent election being
the most egregious examples – and in this sense have made it even worse than it
needed to be. But however it had been handled it would have been damaging, and
most (though not all) peddlers of the ‘not a proper Brexit’ line are advocates
of UKIP’s approach of unilateral withdrawal without Article 50 or, now, walking
out of the talks. Incompetent as the government have been, a Brexit on UKIP
lines would have been an order of magnitude worse.From the
moment the Referendum result was announced, when Johnson and Gove stood shocked
and blinking like frightened rabbits at their press conference, Brexiters
just haven’t been able to get over winning. As I’ve
remarked elsewhere, there’s long been a sense that they would really have
preferred to lose. Now there’s an increasingly tangible feeling that they see
things going wrong and are getting their excuses ready: blame and betrayal
being the key words.Those words
may boomerang on them. At the moment there are only small signs of ‘Bregret’ in
the opinion polls but there does seem to be a growing realization that the
promises made were false. Perhaps for now the sentiment amongst voters is that ‘we
should get on with it’ and ‘hope for the best’ – showing the more endearing
qualities of the British rather than some of those that have been on display
since the vote. Plus, undoubtedly, many voters have tuned out the daily twists
and turns of Brexit and will not take much interest until there is some
decisive outcome or event. When they tune back in, they are not going to like
what they see. Brexiters are preparing for that by lining up a list of culprits
and excuses and they may succeed. But they have also ramped up hostility to the
‘out of touch London elite’. When the dust settles, voters may just decide that
since it is the Brexiters who are now in charge it is they who now constitute
that elite – and they who must shoulder the blame for betraying the unkeepable
promises they made.

Wednesday, 14 February 2018

It is hardly
a great secret that Boris Johnson harbours leadership ambitions. What is less
clear is whether he has leadership qualities. His speech today was billed as
one which would reach out to heal the divisions over Brexit and to provide a
unifying vision for how it would be undertaken. Had he delivered on this it
would indeed have been a demonstration of leadership of a sort which has been
much needed since the Referendum result.That vote was
so close as to reveal little more than a near equal split of views and
endorsing, if anything, only the policy of leaving the EU but not any one of
the many ways touted during the campaign of doing so. Johnson of all people
should realise this, since he reportedly saw the arguments for and against
leaving as so finely balanced that he wrote two articles - one making the case
for, one against - before he belatedly announced his support for leaving. Once
the result was announced, or at least once May became Prime Minister, the
leaderly course would have been to acknowledge those facts and to seek a
consensual way forward. Doing so would have had political difficulties (as
would any course of action) but the form it would have taken is clear. A soft
Brexit that would have given some voters all that they wanted and most voters at
least some of what they wanted.May blew
that chance, which is why Britain is now in such a state of disunity and
bitterness. Perhaps Johnson could, even at this late stage, have done what she
failed to do. But he did not. Instead, apart from a few slightly conciliatory words,
he doubled down on the preposterous position that the ‘Will of the People’ is
for the hard Brexit of seeking neither single market membership nor a
comprehensive customs treaty. Indeed, he implied a position even harder than
that which appears to be that of the government by suggesting that during the
transition period, which Britain needs and has asked for, we should not be bound
by EU law. So his ‘unifying’ message came down to telling remainers and soft
Brexiters alike to suck it up.As for the
supposed intellectual core of his speech, it was based on an absurdity. The EU,
he opined, is a political project rather than a trade project. That is in one
way a statement of well-known fact; well-known since Britain joined what was
then the EEC. Johnson was simply channelling one of Brexit’s foundational myths,
that ‘we did not know what we were joining’ (see this
excellent blog for a detailed debunking of the myth). In another way, it is
a profound misunderstanding of how politics and economics inter-relate, a
misunderstanding that has permeated British Conservatism since its embrace of
Friedman and Hayek in the 1970s.The
misunderstanding is that markets exist ‘naturally’ and prior to regulation,
with regulation coming second and distorting what would otherwise naturally
occur. In fact, regulation is a prior condition for markets, certainly for effectively
functioning markets. So whilst it is true to say that the EU (going right back
to the original European Coal and Steel Community) used economics as a means of
pursuing political goals, it’s also the case that political integration has
been a way of pursuing economic goals. It seems to have been a continual
surprise to Conservative Eurosceptics ever since the Thatcher government pushed
so hard to create the European single market that such a market entails as its
prior condition a trans-national legal and regulatory framework, up to and
including the ECJ.That is the
only reason why the single market, unlike free trade agreements and areas, is
able extensively to dismantle Non-Tariff Barriers and, as a consequence,
liberalise trade in services as well as goods. It is this liberalisation that
Johnson wants Britain to turn its back on, but the irony is that if he succeeds
it will not mean an escape from the world of politics to one of idealised free
trade and free markets: free trade deals and, for that matter, the WTO are
themselves arenas in which political horse-trading and power-plays abound and
within which various forms of transnational regulation and arbitration occur,
often with little or no democratic accountability and control. ‘Global Britain’
outside the EU doesn’t escape the politics of globalization, it just puts
itself in a weaker position both politically and economically by absenting
itself from the regional blocs that frame the politics of globalization.In any case,
this version of 'liberal Brexit' is very far from what many who voted leave were
told they were voting for. Immigration and protectionism may not have been the
only issues in leave voters’ minds but it would be absurd to suggest that they
played no role. The Leave campaign was fought and won on largely illiberal, nationalist
lines, not on liberal, globalist ones. So Johnson is telling those voters,
quite as much as remainers, that they have to suck up the version of Brexit he
endorses. It is a strange kind of unifying speech that is contemptuous of so
many on both sides of the divide.Finally, if
Johnson’s speech was both divisive and intellectually flawed it also failed to
deliver on what is perhaps the most pressing leadership challenge of all at the
present time. What are the concrete, practical details of how Brexit is to be
achieved, even if it is to be a Brexit on Johnson’s preferred lines? On this,
he had nothing whatsoever to say. Like every speech he gives it was long on
rhetoric and devoid of practicalities, as if “confidence and self-belief” can
substitute for pragmatic details. A
campaign speech, not a speech for governance. It’s reported that this is also
how he conducts himself in cabinet discussions. He has nothing to say on the practicalities
because he knows nothing of the practicalities, and he knows nothing of the
practicalities because he does not care about them. And he does not care about
them because he cares about nothing - perhaps not even, in itself, Brexit –
except his own naked ambition. An ambition which is not, it seems, even to lead,
since leadership requires the hard effort of consensus-building and attention
to detail, but the burning, narcissistic desire simply to be the leader.

Friday, 9 February 2018

We hear very
little now of what used to be the Brexiters’ favourite line about the EU
negotiations: that ‘they need us more than we need them’ and so the deal would not
only be an excellent one, but completed in double-quick time. If this blithe
assurance was questioned, we were loftily told with faux-worldly certainty that
the UK trade deficit combined with the German car industry (which apparently
dictates EU policy) would make assurance doubly certain. It was always a
ridiculous idea, and is repeated now only by the most bone-headed and
inattentive.Instead,
what we hear more frequently are complaints about being punished by the EU.
That trope
has been growing almost since the Referendum result, and this week has been
especially vocally expressed. Michel Barnier’s rather anodyne
observation, during his visit to Britain on Monday, that leaving the single
market and customs union inevitably meant greater barriers to trade was merely
a statement of the most obvious of facts. Yet Brexiters treated it as a
dastardly threat, as if it were being forced
upon them rather than being the policy that they, themselves, insist on.That was
nothing, though, compared with the furore over the revelation that the EU are
planning for sanctions to be used if during the transition period (if such
there is to be) Britain were to break the terms agreed for it. Even the
Guardian lapsed into the language of punishment to report this, whilst the
pro-Brexit press went berserk. Yet in one way it is hardly a surprising development
– all sorts of agreements have penalty clauses – whilst in another it reflects
a situation of Britain’s own making.That is because
the way that the government have conducted themselves during the negotiations
hardly inspires trust, with David Davis suggesting when the ink was still wet
on it that the phase 1 agreement was not necessarily binding. For that matter,
bellicose talk of a Brexit ‘war cabinet’ does nothing to engender confidence of
good faith, any more than did May’s (now abandoned) implication of using security
cooperation as a bargaining lever, or ‘remainer’ Hammond’s threat of Britain
pursuing a different economic model of low taxes and deregulation if a deal isn’t
done.But there is
a wider and more fundamental issue. Given the fragility of the present
administration no one knows what the composition of the British government will
be by the time we get to any transition period. It’s perfectly conceivable that
the Ultras will be in full control with, say, Johnson or even Rees-Mogg in
Number 10. Given the noises they have made, it’s easy to envisage such a
government reneging on whatever had been agreed to in the negotiations. It is
humiliating to think that the British government might not be trustworthy: but it’s
a humiliation brought on Britain by the wild rhetoric of the Ultras.Brexiters
are now locked into an endless tricycling around three different modes of
conduct. There’s the Pollyannaish naivety of ‘it will all get sorted out by
German car makers’; the bullish aggression of ‘no deal’ Ultras; and the
outraged self-pity of ‘punishment’. Sometimes all three modes are on display at
the same time. What is never on display from the Brexiters is any kind of
practical plan to deliver what they want. That is fundamentally because what
they want is undeliverable – in essence, undiluted political nationalism as
well as undiluted economic globalism – and secondarily because by refusing to recognize
that impossibility they are unable to come up with some diluted version of it
which, if not desirable, might at least be achievable.The
consequence of being trapped in this cycle, to which, as
argued in my previous post, May’s government are now shackled is the
paralysis seen this week with the Cabinet Brexit sub-committee (that ‘war
cabinet’) again having failed to come up with a plan of action. There will
apparently be an Awayday to discuss it again in a couple of weeks’ time. But
until some basic realities are accepted – and more especially the
incompatibilities in what Brexiters want is accepted – there will be no
progress. An impossible question cannot be answered no matter how long you
spend discussing it.In any case time
is what we do not have. Whilst Brexiters keep going through the same old loops
the rest of the world is trying, as forcefully as it can, to get them to realise
this. Michel Barnier
professes himself mystified that Britain will not make (and apparently
doesn’t understand) the choices it needs to make. This is the nearest that
diplomacy-speak can come to telling the government of another country that it
appears to have gone completely round the twist. Meanwhile, the Japanese
Ambassador, following a meeting of Japanese businesses with May and others
ministers, warns: “if there is no profitability of continuing operation in the
UK – not Japanese only – no company can continue operations. So it’s as simple
as that. This is all high stakes that I think all of us need to keep in mind”.
In diplomacy-speak that means not only do you seem to have gone completely
round the twist, but also that if you don’t come to your senses soon your economy is
going to go down the toilet.The whole
situation is beginning to resemble the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, with Jack being
the Brexit Ultras, the mythical Beast being the EU, Ralph being, perhaps, Theresa May, and the
Conch being the Referendum result. Remainers play the role of Simon, whilst the
British people have to be cast as poor old Piggy. Alas, there seems as yet to
be no one to take the part of the adult who arrives to rescue the children and
chide them for their un-British, brutal behaviour.

Friday, 2 February 2018

There are
perhaps 50 - I have seen estimates varying between 40 and 80 - Tory MPs in the
so-called European
Research Group (ERG; ‘so-called’ as this is not some anodyne bunch of
researchers, but a group of fanatical, extremist ideologues). They include several
Ministers, perhaps nine Cabinet members, and many of the media’s darlings for
Brexit commentary including, of course, the ERG’s current chairman Jacob
Rees-Mogg. Even before becoming its leader he seemed to appear on the BBC quite
as often as any of the Corporation’s most senior journalists. Now, he might as
well have his own dedicated studio. It is this group of, for the most part,
middle-aged white men who are holding the government, and hence our country, to
ransom. They speak – they speak splenetically - for themselves and no doubt
some, possibly many, leave voters, but they purport to speak for all leave
voters and hence, of course, for ‘the People’.May made a
fatal miscalculation in thinking that the Ultras would be appeased by hard
Brexit. As Major and Cameron had found before her, every concession made to
them only produced a new and even more extreme demand. Thus whereas before the
Referendum many of them said that a soft Brexit (i.e. staying in the single
market and having a comprehensive customs treaty) would be enough, immediately
afterwards they insisted that only hard Brexit would do. But when that became
the government’s policy, they started agitating for a no deal Brexit. Some of
them, such as Nadine Dorries, seem
to have no idea what they are advocating or why. It might be thought that
Dorries is an outlier and that all the other members are well-apprised of the
practical meanings of hard Brexit, but a glance at the list of their names
suggests that this might be excessively charitable.By promising
hard Brexit at the point that she was politically strongest, May created an
impossible situation which has become clear now that she is so weak. What she accepted
was that the lies of the Leave campaign could be made true. That is, that it
would be possible to have all of the economic benefits of being in the EU
without any of the politically unpalatable consequences in terms of, in
particular, free movement of people and ECJ jurisdiction. This could never be
delivered, not because the EU would never agree to it, but because they couldn’t agree to it since it was based
on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the single market is: an entity which
by definition entails free movement and which by definition requires a
supra-national regulator.Trapped by
her own choices into delivering an undeliverable policy, May is now stuck. She
can’t easily retreat from hard Brexit having promised it, and she can’t follow
the ERG punks to a no deal Brexit without comprehensively wrecking the British
economy – meaning not just mass unemployment but the end of air travel and the
introduction of food rationing that would occur as a consequence of a ‘no deal’
Brexit. The Ultras don’t care about that – some of them probably believe it
would be a good way of toughening us up – but for anyone with any remote sense
of public duty, let alone any political nous, it’s a complete non-starter. In
recent weeks it seems as if business leaders and civil servants have convinced
May of this.It’s against
this background that the various storms and spats of the last week are to be
understood. As predicted in my
previous post, the quiet period of recent weeks has come to an abrupt end.
The leak
of the government’s economic forecasts produced no real surprises. They are
in line with what most previous forecasts have suggested in showing that all
forms of Brexit are economically damaging, and the harder the Brexit, the
greater the damage. But the response underscored just how rabid the Ultras have
become, denouncing not just the forecasts themselves but impugning the motives
of the civil servants who prepared them. Such criticism of the civil service
was always inevitable, as I have said since
the first post on the blog, and has been bubbling away for a while. But as
the realities bite they are becoming more vociferous, and although Steve
Baker (former ERG Chair, now DExEU Minister) had to apologise for having
voiced them in the House of Commons there can surely be little doubt that many
Brexit Ultras are convinced that the civil service is part of a great remainer
elite conspiracy.But the more
vociferous the Ultras become the greater the sense that events are moving away
from them. The response to the leaked economic forecasts as a new instalment of
‘Project Fear’ is not just predictable, it’s shop-soiled; whilst the Will of
the People in which they have so successfully cloaked themselves now looks
distinctly moth-eaten. Time has taken its toll on the Ultras mainly because just
as having agitated for a Referendum for years they were unable to produce a
plan for how Brexit should be done, so too have they failed to come up with
anything workable since the Referendum. On the contrary, what has been exposed
is that a government that has adopted their hard Brexit position has been
unable to craft it into something deliverable. That’s the real significance of
Baker’s apology: when in government posts the Ultras are forced to take
responsibility in a way that they are free from outside of government.It’s for
this reason that the Ultras hold off deposing May, which they surely have the
numbers to do, as Rafael
Behr argues in a superb essay in Prospect
this week. They don’t want to take responsibility for delivering something
which has already been shown to be undeliverable, and prefer to complain of
betrayal. Victimhood, as I have
argued several times on this blog, is their comfort zone. That can, as we
have seen in abundance over Brexit, make for effective politics; it doesn’t
make for effective policy. The moment for the Ultras to strike, if they were
going to, passed with the phase 1 deal. If they strike now they are as likely
to see Brexit slip through their fingers as get anything close to what they
want than they will get from May’s government. Hence Liam
Fox this week telling the Ultras they must learn to live with disappointment.Yet if the
Ultras are not able to bring down May, she is also not able to stand up to
them. So she continues to grind out her mantras of ‘deep and special
partnership’, the ‘Brexit the British people want’ and refusing to commit one
way or another on the
current question about a UK-EU customs treaty. Maybe she doesn’t want to
stand up to them, and believes this tosh she comes out with – but if so, what’s
clear is that at every stage she ends up conceding on things the Ultras hold
dear. They know that she’s done it, they know that she will continue to do it,
but there’s nothing they can do to stop her. But she can’t tell them that that
is what she will continue to do, and maybe doesn’t even realise that this is
what she will continue to do.And so, for
the time being anyway – for it surely can’t continue forever – Brexit Britain limps
along with a terrified, mauled zoo keeper chained to a snarling, feral beast;
each reliant on the other, but each loathing the other. At one moment the
keeper lashes the beast spitefully with her whip; the next moment the beast lacerates
the keeper savagely with its claws. Each time, a little blood is drawn but they
remain manacled together because they have manacled themselves to each other.
Meanwhile the rest of us, and the rest of the world, look on in horror, dismay
and disgust at this revolting spectacle.

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About Me

I am Professor of Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, and was previously a Professor at Cambridge University and Warwick University. I am a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). I originally studied Economics and Politics at Manchester University, where I also gained a PhD on the regulation of financial services. I blog in a personal capacity and all views expressed are mine, not those of my employer. My Brexit Blog is accompanied by a twitter feed @chrisgreybrexit. For media enquiries, contact Samantha.daynes@rhul.ac.uk